The appeal of EdX is that, as a nonprofit, it is presumably under less pressure than businesses like Coursera and Udacity to turn its online courses into major profit-makers. Hence its commitment to keeping its software open-source, so that others can use and build on it. That dovetails with Google’s own approach. Last year the search behemoth launched Course Builder, its own open-source platform for creating online courses. In a blog post announcing the company’s partnership with EdX, director of research Dan Clancy said that Google will take what it has learned from Course Builder and apply it to Open EdX and Mooc.org. It seems likely that Course Builder will in fact eventually be rolled into Mooc.org, though Google said it will continue to maintain the site for the time being.

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